Why Not Negation By Fixpoint?

Summary: Demonstrates that the natural fixpoint semantics for DATALOG with negation faces inherent complexity-theoretic barriers to efficient implementation. Introduces Inflationary DATALOG, an efficiently implementable negation semantics based on inflationary fixpoints. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 832
Venue: PODS
Year: 1988
Pagerank: 0.00012804792
Overall Rank: 989 | 93.22%
DOI: 10.1145/308386.308446

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Phokion G. Kolaitis (IBM; Stanford University)
2. Christos H. Papadimitriou (University of California San Diego)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{kolaitis_pods88,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '88},
        title = {{WHY NOT NEGATION BY FIXPOINT?}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/308386.308446},
        doi = {10.1145/308386.308446},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Kolaitis, Phokion G. and Papadimitriou, Christos H.},
        year = {1988}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
355	Object Identity As A Query Language Primitive	1989	SIGMOD	0.00020351749
702	PROCEDURAL AND DECLARATIVE DATABASE UPDATE LANGUAGES (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS	0.00014855299
889	Constraint Programming and Database Languages: A Tutorial	1995	PODS	0.00013398105
2,110	Theory of Database Queries (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS	9.1532803e-05
2,400	Untyped Sets, Invention, and Computable Queries	1989	PODS	8.6299917e-05
4,178	A Web Odyssey: from Codd to XML	2001	PODS	6.849218e-05
4,238	Polynomial Time Query Processing in Temporal Deductive Databases	1990	PODS	6.8109945e-05
4,263	Explicit Control of Logic Programs Through Rule Algebra	1988	PODS	6.7942527e-05
4,831	Stable Models and Non-Determinism in Logic Programs with Negation	1990	PODS	6.4877275e-05
4,943	Datalog Unchained	2021	PODS	6.4332239e-05
6,558	Queries are easier than you thought (probably)	1992	PODS	5.8396421e-05
7,384	CONSTRAINT QUERY LANGUAGES (preliminary report)	1990	PODS	5.6282573e-05
7,885	IDLOG: Extending the Expressive Power of Deductive Database Languages	1990	SIGMOD	5.5228272e-05
13,105	A Non-deterministic Deductive Database Language	1991	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
702	PROCEDURAL AND DECLARATIVE DATABASE UPDATE LANGUAGES (Extended Abstract)	1988	PODS	0.00014855299

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